Some projects tend to like to abstract everything - KDE, I am looking at your developer base, see phonon for a very misguided effort. While abstracting config files like elektra tries to do looks like a laudable goal, it can't cover all of them plus is a maintenance nightmare.
Adding a crappy^Wbloated c++ layer in order not to prompt user is definitely using the wrong tool at hands. It seems this year again Debian choose super boring Google summer subjects, while Linaro let the students do cool stuff. BTW git implemented all kind of merge strategies, that would be the first place to look at and merge into dpkg.

Since the release of xf86-video-intel 2.99.911 lots of changes landed in upstream git. Hence for better Haswell support it was decided to use latest git. Again testing is appreciated (positive tests known on Haswell-ULT HD 4400 and Haswell HD Graphics 5000): xserver-xorg-video-intel packages.

Paperscape visualizes all the arXiv papers. The arXiv is a pioneer in Open Data publishing from 1991 and started by Paul Ginsparg for high energy physicists (hep). It soon extended to most physicists.

According to it's importance (citation) each paper has a certain radius and the citations also link the papers to their position in the map. In addition there are helpful overall topics and one can click once zoomed in on each paper to know all the authors and the title. The colors correspond to each arXiv section.

1.5M CPU hours runs on the Vienna Scientific Cluster by my 3D+3V hard expanding loops code. It is simulating the Chromo-Weibel instability of a non-Abelian plasma in an 1d expanding background to account for the expansion of a Quark-Gluon plasma fireball in a heavy ion collision. The code is parallellised using Open MPI and one single run roughly needs 0.5TB memory to hold all the needed 5-dimensional matrices and ~ 72h to complete. The resulting heavy operation is of course matrix multiplication of those physical and auxilliary fields.

I tried to usegit-annex on the resulting physical fields data output of ~ 150Gb and 300k files. Currently I do prefer git itself for it's speed and it only doubles the amounted space. I'm thrilled to see that git annex is still considering this "semi-extreme" usecase of lots of data files as it would help collaborators to have partial checkouts for laptop usage and quick checks. As the git-annex kickstarter is a rocket, i'd add my wish to see the current symlink mess go: desymlink git-annex.

The new klibc features prominently the merged stdio branch (causing the version bump). The buffered I/0 allows a faster fstype and thus faster boot. Plus klibc gained the support of several stream I/O functions, for details see the longer story on: klibc 2.0 release announcement or klibc git repository.

The dhcp cmd ipconfig can now generate enough info for a proper lease file too and got fixed concerning the min length of it's replies. Google sponsored the /etc/fstab or cmdline boot mounting in kinit.

The Gnome shell is a great step. Finally the Linux default Desktop is not only useful (as Gnome 2.X used to be), but also stylish and modern. It's a different kind of desktop, which seems to irk desktop habits of some peoples. I'm proud to show it off. This happened for the last time years ago while doing some funny config quirks of fvwm. Gnome 3.x is cool. (: Also the customisability via all the extensions is fun.

What I do miss is the gnome weather (There used to be an incarnation with plenty of geographical sites, which got somehow got axed later.) and more packaged extensions for out of the box deployments (wish #661782).

I seem to be too lunatic to find session settings in "System Settings" for having startup applications run or the used applications reopened (please yes evince show the same pdfs).

The other minor critic is that "System Settings" is quite empty, but has on each system a funny advertisement for "Wacom Tablets". Ah and after a myriad of suspends and network-manager stops/restarts gnome-shell likes to segfault, which is no nuisance as it restarts.

The feed agregegator for particle physics blogs got relaunched too that automn. In case you are interested in particle physics this should keep any reader updated on the Higgs hunt, black holes searches, fundamental interactions and much more.

As usual the result it returns is the integral itself.. :/ So yes indeed Maxima is nice for simple undergrads calculation: Maximum Calculus with Maxima, but unfortunately don't expect much for more complex problems. The result is the partition function of the chiral perturbation theory in the simple setup of equal quark masses and one quark flavour family. Sadly Integrals returning Bessel functions seem to regularly fail.

Mike Waychison from Google sent fancy costum tailored enhancements to kinit. Thanks to new klibc capget and capset support kinit now understands "drop_capabilities=" bootparam. It specifies a list of capability names that will be dropped before switching over to init. dirent.h saw the addition of scandir() and alphasort(). Gentoo devs pushed a klcc enhancement. For details see klibc 1.5.25 release annoucement.

Craig Small gives a very bad advice on his recent post Debian Linux on HP DV6-6023TX. As soon as one loads such a binary graphics driver your Linux kernel is marked as tainted. Due to be running a proprietary module your box may behave strangely and is certainly not debuggable. Be aware that in such a case you are no longer running a free and open OS.

What he actually wants is a very recent 3.0 linux image from experimental and to google for vga switcheroo, which leads to the following commit with explanations for
/sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch: vga_switcheroo: initial implementation (v15).

This new release features /run usage and xz support. For the details see the release announcement of latest initramfs-tools. The upload itself fixes 18 (19) bugs in the Debian BTS and has also a cute lilo support patch hiding under "initramfs-tools: Fix handling of numeric root= arguments to be udev-friendly" coming from Ubuntu. (; Ben Hutchings revamped the bootloader linux-2.6 hooks in order that update-initramfs no longer calls any bootloader by itself. Thank you for all the contributions. The development docs got nicely refreshed too.

I'll collect here links to the various linux-2.6 distribution trees based on the longterm release 2.6.32. I won't go into details of bigger external patches (grsec, openvz, rt, xen, ..), which in consequence also aligned themselves on 2.6.32.

Important bug fixes usually are connected to some bug report, which may be publicly viewable. So from the patch and changelog entry one can usually assume if a certain patch satisfies the stable criteria and forward it for 2.6.32 longterm inclusion (+ other branches where it might apply). If the patch applies and compiles fine with the Debian tree one can assume that the patch will be fine for upstream 2.6.32 as Debian with small exceptions mostly follows the longterm release: 2.6.32 branch of Debian linux-2.6 (Comment: This is currently only a svn mirror but this bug is worked on for next release).

The canonical 2.6.32 linux-2.6 longterm repository is of course on kernel.org maintained by gregkh. Opensuse publishes it's kernel-source on gitorious including all branches and the especially interesting SLE11-SP1 2.6.32 branch. Fedora was following till late Autumn 2.6.32 and the F12 branch has the relevant patches. Ubuntu released 10.04 with 2.6.32 as in a collaborative decision they also based their drm on 2.6.33 (same story as in Debian, thus particularly relevant for us). Oracle had a 2.6.32 that was maintained until Sept 2010 or such.

It is already bad that kernel source in Red Hat doesn't really follow upstream 2.6.32 longterm release itself. For 2.6.18 of course no such option existed, but for 2.6.32 this policy already shows a certain snobbery. Red Hat 6.0 Beta at least shipped kernel-2.6.32-37.el6.src.rpm with broken out patches - since then no patch series or git tree to be seen from RH. This strange move got since picked by lwn - RH "obfuscated" kernel source.

This release is "slightly" delayed due to lots of physics calculations for my final PhD year at the TU Vienna with all fixes that piled up since last summer: Support for newer GNU make 3.82, x86_32 signal fun, the self explantory KBUILD_REPRODUCIBLE and various cleanups: For details see klibc 1.5.21 release announcements or klibc git.

Beside the productive Debian kernel team meeting, whose minutes will be forthcoming, the mini Debconf had a great welcoming setup and friendly chats. We enjoyed an impulsive Saturday evening at Chatelet in middle of the funny Parisian Halloween mess.
Update: Photo of the last busy meeting session during lunch break that allowed us to finalise all Paris meeting topics.

Frans Pop contributions to Debian has already been honoured: Frans Pop obituary by Steve McIntyre. One less known fact is that he hacked in upstream linux-2.6 too. Latest linux-2.6 git lists him with 80 commits. A bigger part of his work was testing latest linux-2.6 on different architectures. There are lots of patches with "Reported-by: Frans Pop " and "Tested-by: Frans Pop ". Also in this field he was aiming for big coverage and a special responsive tester.

I am very sad to have missed the opportunity to meet you in person. You are missed. Rest in peace, my friend.

This release fixes an important ipconfig regression from Lenny due to a badly tested monster patch 4efbcf90f60. ipconfig should now perform better then ever, thanks to the inflow of fixes since Lenny release. This RC fixes are scheduled for Squeeze and it already landed in Sid.

1.5.19 had no release announcement, but fixed compilation on x86_32, the syscall handling on sh4 (initramfs-tools is said to boot fine with it), valgrind ipconfig warnings and added getrusage() for the mksh port.

Apparently this statements also holds true for frozen yogurt. An Austrian A1 spokes person has confirmed that the HTC Magic will not receive a 2.1 or 2.2 Android update. One can only wonder about the sugar HTC puts on top of regular Android that hinders themself to update their products. The Austrian A1 carrier sells you the device for a 18 month contract, but actively only supported it for 6 month. I must revise my previous positive review of the HTC Magic.

The Webkit Android Browser can be easily tricked into leaking your user and passwords: Android Luecke. Beside the obvious that as a user one shouldn't give out to much data to untrusted third party this opens lots of Google accounts for criminal activity. The inability of the carrier to provide a secure and uptodate device is massively deceiving and certainly not appropriate handling of their defects liability.

Landau, L. D.; Lifshitz, E. M. (1976). Course of Theoretical Physics is still the most interesting and solid base that is to be considered as a reference and inspiration in Theoretical Physics.

The reference for "Classical Electrodynamics" is the book by J.D. Jackson. "Advanced Quantum Mechanics" by J.J. Sakurai is a popular student choice. Compendium of Relations contains various formulas and relations of the Standard Model. The Lecture Notes on General Relativity by S. Carroll are a solid introduction for an initiate relativist. "Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell" by A. Zee is amazing. Quantum electrodynamics can be explored in the books by "The Quantum Theory of Fields" by S. Weinberg or "Quantum field theory" by L.H. Ryder or Quantum Chromodynamics in M.E. Peskin & D.V. Schroeder "An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory". The lecture notes on Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) might be interesting for people diving into the particle physics standard model. "Finite-temperature field theory: Principles and Application" discusses systems in equilibrium but at finite temperatures and chemical potentials and thus connects to cosmology of the early universe.

The field of Statistical Field Theory has the classic "Quantum Many-Particle Systems" by J.W. Negele and H. Orland or the more recent "Quantum Field Theory of Many-Body Systems" by X-G. Wen or "Ultracold Quantum Fields" by H.T.C Stoof, D.B.M. Dickerscheid, K. Gubbels.

String Theory is so diverse that you'll find lots of different approaches, recommendations are Graduate Course in String Theory by A. Uranga, Applied Conformal Field Theory by P. Ginsparg, Lectures on String Theory by D. Tong or more introductory the book "A First Course in String Theory
" by B. Zwiebach or the dense "Superstring Theory" by M. Green, J. Schwarz and E. Witten, "String Theory" by J. Polchinski. "Quantum Field Theory of Point Particles and Strings" by B. Hatfield assumes no previous stringy background and is known for excellent explanation of the path integral formalism. M. Nakahara wrote the wonderfull bridge to maths: "Geometry, Topology and Physics".

So please when looking for "references" in theoretical physics venture on solid grounds and don't get distracted by sketchy notes.

The overdue dash sync from 0.5.3 took a month to be done, but now klibc is shipping newer dash 0.5.6 then actual unstable dash.

Fixes for this release include fstype support for btrfs and ext4 without journal. Moving README's around so that they can be shipped for avid readers: README.ipconfig go :) The goodie from this time is the sh4 build fix form the very active Debian sh4 porters. ipconfig, nfsmount and kinit have now simpler DEBUG build. ipconfig build warnings got shot by a Google patch.

Heavy Ion collisions try to recreate conditions very shortly after the Big Bang. Thus the created quark gluon plasma is often the Little Bang, due to recreating this very hot conditions.
The kernel Team already uploaded the linux-2.6 Big Bang release now follows initramfs-tools with the Little Bang. ;-)

Newer initramfs comes with lots of fixes and new features:

Faster boot thanks to Ubuntu merged patches using pre-cached boot scripts. It be cool if someone could time that and let us know?

Support for several compression schemes as set in initramfs.conf or overridden by appropriate mkinitramfs call.

Better MODULES=dep support /sys parsing (Still needs fixes for md).

Hooks for out of linux-2.6 make deb-pkg generated linux-images.

Call ipconfig with increasing timeouts to better fit with large scale clusters.

Use BOOTIF mac address passed from gpxe in setup_networking.

Out of the box support for devtmpfs. Hurra for devfs 2.0.

Loading of the netconsole module together with the specified args, when netconsole is set as bootarg.

Adds available, built network drivers in a dynamic way without need
of hardcoded list.

Smaller and thus faster MODULES=most generated initramfs due to kicking the video drivers out of generic initramfs.

Last but not least don't suppress eventual modprobe errors.

Thanks for all the patches and useful input! Sorry for late release, will try to do it earlier more often and there is hope of an Ubuntu sync: view of initramfs-tools repo.
P.S.: cryptsetup needs fixup of #576488, udev can now start at a earlier stage of initramfs.

Not only fixes ipconfig regressions due to fixes in 1.5.16, but ipconfig should no longer discard useful packages. We also fixed a long standing klibc sparc specific socket bug (#444087): sparc lists socket system calls, but does not provide all of them natively. So one is better off on sparc to use sys_socketcall.

Thanks to Jan Hauke Rahm the packaging switched to modern Source Format 3.0 (quilt) with debhelper 7 usage reducing cdbs overhead on build. This is a big switch and makes me very happy.

New addition include a $(make help) target in Makefile to ease klibc build. A small losetup got added to klibc-utils.

i386 and sparc build fine against current linux-libc-dev: klibc-1.5.17 released
P.S.: New outfall seem to include armel and s390 due to libgcc changes.
Update: Seems only a small packaging error due to test target invocation, should be fixed in 1.5.17-3.

The upload reduced RC count by one as klibc builds against recent linux-libc-dev including 2.6.34-rc1. Also libklic-dev uses them directly once installed thanks to a patch from Ben Hutchings. The klibc build saw several fixes from a big and refined Google patch queue.

Experimental 2.6.33 will do the switch to UUID based root args, if you haven't switched already. Please test it out and report bugs on it, before we add the libata switch to squeeze 2.6.32.

2.6.32-9 includes 2.6.32.9 and several other fixes. For the following 2.6.32-10 Ben Hutchings pulled in newer drm for lots of intel fixes: Status of kernel X drivers. It also features radeon and nouveau KMS modules. Current 2.6.32 is stabilizing well and we are seeing lots of external patches lining up.

When you just read the following sentence:
"usage of a software, that can only be used together with the Internet Explorer".
You already know the consequence that several hundreds Wienux boxes are gone.
Heavily disgusted by the waste of community money.

The online local newspaper has a comment that seems quite to the point to me:
"If as sysadmin you introduce Linux you'll be accounted for eventual failures,
while with softies people just accept the shortcomings and won't blame you."
German source: Wiener Inkompetenz in IT Managment.

P.S.: Wienux got setup by inexerienced people having no prior exposure to Open Source. The project setup included a calculated failure from the start.

planet.teilchen.at is a shiny new
selected blog roll of prominent Particle Physics blogs. Reading it should keep
you updated on progress at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as well as on new
discoveries in High Energy Physics, Astrophysics, Cosmology, advances in
Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), String Theory, Black Holes and many other hot
physics topics. Most posts should be readable for scientifically interested
public. Enjoy a daily read.

www.teilchen.at is the Austrian
outreach site of Austrian particle and nuclear physicists. Authors are leading
austrian scientists. The site just got relaunched with new features including
some socialweb goodies (planet, share links on the bottom, better readability,
noframes, ..). Happy if you send corrections or suggestions to
mattems@teilchen.at.

In the case of feedback I'd highly recommend to bring the Debian Kernel Mailinglist into the loop. The meeting decisions were done by the team as entity.

Responding to the deprecation of some external patches (Vserver, Xen Dom0): None of above patches have an upstream that supported the Lenny released version. Both have troublesome bugs in Lenny and thus are not in a condition one would expect from a stable release. If you want to help and have continued release of those beyond squeeze the answer is easy: Get them merged upstream. Openvz supports Lenny linux-2.6 version actively and promised to keep up with their work for Squeeze.

It has been a very productive meeting with lots of problems^Witems discussed. Interesting tracks for better cooperation between distributions, heavy technical tracks and loud BOFS. Quite some work has already been picked up since (Bug scripts, 2.6.31 experimental uploads, DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=parallel=N support, package descriptions improvements, piuparts install fix, DFSG firmware clean, preempt, ..). So thanks a lot to Steve McIntyre (Debian Project Leader) for pushing the meeting, to Steve Langasek for setting it up on site and of course to everyone who contributed. Read aboves report for the full picture. :-)